


In Search of Perplexity

by Cherepashka



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ankh-Morpork, Deja-fu, Gen, History Monks (Discworld) - Freeform, Humor, Lu-Tze's search for perplexity, Rule One, Worldbuilding Exchange, the mean streets of Ankh-Morpork
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:22:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23231647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherepashka/pseuds/Cherepashka
Summary: Perplexity, thought Lu Tze, was not only much more fun to seek than enlightenment, but much more efficient, too.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 23
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2020





	In Search of Perplexity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karanguni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/gifts).



> Thank you for the fun prompts, karanguni! Not sure this hits the mark, but here's a bit of Lu Tze's backstory. Hope you enjoy!

Perplexity, thought Lu-Tze, was not only much more fun to seek than enlightenment, but much more efficient, too. Acolytes who traveled from across the Disc to the remote monastery of Oi-Dong, nestled high in the Ramtop Mountains and home to the Order of Wen the Eternally Surprised, often spent years, lifetimes in fact,1 waiting on enlightenment. Most of them got stuck somewhere around en-guttering-candle-that-throws-off-your-night-vision-more-than-it-really-helps-you-see-enment, lingering there for decades and stumbling into things they might easily have avoided if they’d only blown out the candle and let their eyes adjust. 

In contrast, Lu-Tze had arrived in Ankh-Morpork mere hours ago—and not the stretched sort of hours either, which could last months, but the regular sort, which lasted exactly sixty minutes unless there happened to be a monk at work nearby—and already he found himself profoundly perplexed. 

He had, he was quite sure, departed the very square in which he now stood a mere ten minutes earlier, by, if he was not mistaken, that very alleyway to his right—or perhaps that other alleyway at opening-of-the-White-Waterlily2—but in any case the point was he had departed by an alleyway, which, while it had admittedly snaked and turned a bit, had by no means wound around enough to return him full circle to the square he had only just left. Then again, time could after all be curved and bent and looped on itself, all while the vast majority of people living in it went on without a clue that it might be proceeding in anything but a straight line. Why not space as well? Lu-Tze might not have expected that the specific space to display such a property would be a dim and unevenly cobbled alley in the vicinity of Cheap Street, but then, was not one of the teachings of Wen the Eternally Surprised that expectation was a tricky thing? It tended to limit the experience of surprise to the unexpected, which rather defeated the purpose of cultivating surprise at _everything_. 

Well, he had come here seeking perplexity, so it only made sense to embrace his first experience of it. He would leave the square again, by the alleyway to his right, again (or possibly for the first time if in fact he had left by the alleyway behind him earlier), and keep careful track to see if he fetched up here a third time. 

He kept careful enough track of the alleyway that he did not immediately notice the five men who followed him into it; but of course, when it comes to the History Monks of Oi-Dong, the word “immediately” comes with an automatic qualifier of “plus or minus a century here or there, and possibly before there was anything to be noticed.” 

***

Elsewhen: In one of the many villages dotting the valleys of the Ramtops, where rivulets of snowmelt danced and cavorted and generally engaged in the sort of activities that would be blurred out if a group of Concerned Citizens Who Want You To Think Of The Children ever got wind of them, a father regarded his youngest son with consternation.

“That is just,” he said at last, grasping at one of the universal last-resort answers of parents, right up there along with ‘Would you like a time-out instead?’ and ‘Because I said so’, “how it is.”

“I don’t see why,” the small boy retorted. “Just because I’ve only ever _met_ kids who’re younger than their parents doesn’t mean they always _have_ to be. And if the kid was older—”

“Then perhaps he could decide for himself whether he wanted to eat the greens in his barley soup or not. But he isn’t, so he can’t.” This with a pointed glare toward the sodden mass of leafy vegetables sitting at the bottom of his son’s bowl. 

“Of course,” broke in the young lad’s mother, Dorje, “there _is_ a place where a child could learn to be older than his parents, or so they say.” She set down the bundle of firewood she had just brought in and approached the table where her son had been engaged in a stand-off with the soup for a good twenty minutes.

He looked up at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “There is?”

Dorje sat down next to him and took the opportunity of his distraction to slip a spoonful of greens into his mouth. Before he could spit it out, she said, “A monastery. High up in the mountains, much higher than we are. They say the monks there learn to do all sorts of things with Time.”

The boy found he had to chew and swallow in order to make room in his mouth for his next question. “Like what?”

“Oh,” said Dorje thoughtfully, darting another swift spoonful of greens into the space after the question, “I’d bet learning to be older than your parents is only the beginning. Most of us probably can’t even imagine half of it. They say time can be folded and stitched and torn and put on and taken off...” 

“Like clothes.” To the young miscreant, who had only very recently come around to the idea that there were times and situations where clothes ought to stay _on_ , this idea hit with the force of a thunderbolt. 

“Just like clothes,” Dorje agreed, slipping the last of the greens past her offspring’s parted lips. “And I would bet that a novice at that monastery could learn such interesting things that he wouldn’t even have time to _notice_ whether he was eating his greens.”

At last the boy took note of the now-empty bowl. Realization dawned like the sort of sunrise that makes you wonder what the artist was _thinking_ , oversaturating all the pigments like that. He glared up at his mother in accusation. 

“Yes, he would have time to notice.” A distinct note of betrayal colored the voice of the chubby lad who would come to be known as Lu-Tze the Sweeper, greatest field operative ever to emerge from the broom closets of Oi-Dong. “He’d have _all_ the time in the _world_.”

***

“Ah, thank you, Drumknott,” the Patrician said, accepting the week’s briefings from his clerk. “Let’s see, the Thieves’ Guild is stepping up enforcement on unlicensed larcenous activity—dear me, that seems a bit extreme, though I can see how it would be effective... the Acting Archchancellor requests additional funds to keep up with the allotment for the Dean—funny, you know, the Dean’s last budget request included the exact same language about the Archchancellor... a minor fire at the Ramkin Estate—this is the third in as many weeks, one has to wonder what Lady Sybil is up to, though I’ll grant she at least gets them put out quickly enough..." He skimmed through the remaining pages in a matter of seconds. There seemed, for once, to be nothing in immediate danger of collapse, riot, or utter disaster. It had taken some years to clean up the mess left in the wake of Mad Lord Snapcase’s reign,3 but things appeared at last to be... stabilizing. It was a rather novel experience.

“There was one thing, sir, that I thought prudent not to commit to paper.”

Ah. There it was. 

Vetinari steepled his fingers. “Oh?”

“A small disturbance in the Street of Cunning Artificers, involving the misplacement of a diagram sketched into the margins of a treatise on Ephebian stonework.”

“This diagram, it wouldn’t happen to be..." The Patrician paused. It was the sort of pause that invited elaboration. 

“A schematic of a device that, when deployed, would release a cloud of highly toxic fumes over a sizeable surrounding area, causing the painful death or disfigurement of anyone within radius. The individual responsible for the diagram asserted that his intention in drawing it was to make the horrors of the design so patently obvious that it would deter anyone contemplating actually building such a thing.”

A faint frown creased Vetinari’s brow. 

“The diagram has since been located, and confiscated,” Drumknott said. 

Vetinari nodded. “Still, the situation is not sustainable. The man is a menace of marginalia; one day one of his creations will find its way into the wrong hands, if something isn’t done. It’s only a matter of time.”

Drumknott seemed to hesitate for a moment, which was enough to garner Vetinari’s full attention. 

“About that, sir.” 

***

Elsewhen: “I’m not sure this will work.”

“Of course it’ll work. Look, everything experiences the flow of time, right? All we have to do is make it remember what it experienced a day ago.” 

“Right, Qu, that’s not the bit that worries me.”

Qu, barreling on unconcerned, did not wait to hear which was the bit that worried Lu-Tze. “Same principle as the Procrastinators, only we’ve stored the day in a false floor tile. When triggered, the floor tile releases its stored time, which activates the memory in whatever’s above it—specifically, the Master of Novices’ robes—and reverts them back to the state they occupied exactly a day ago—specifically, hanging upside down on the clothesline. Only it doesn’t move them in _space_ , so they’ll just be hanging upside down _as if_ on a clothesline.”

The plan had sprung from a whispered discussion in the dormitories between the two novices after a particularly confusing lecture. ‘I mean,’ Qu had said, ‘if there’s such a thing as the Trousers of Time, then wouldn’t that imply that time could be pantsed?’ And Lu-Tze had acceded that, yes, it would, so presumably it could.

Only—

“Qu, what makes you so sure the time-memory field will only operate on the Master of Novices’ _robes_?”

“Oh, that’s easy, it’s...” Qu trailed off. To Lu-Tze, watching what happened next to his face was rather like watching yak butter get stirred into tea: faint swirls of buttery horror drifted across Qu’s expression, gradually replacing the certainty there until his entire tea-brown visage went butter-colored, with that same telltale oily sheen on top. 

“Qu,” said Lu-Tze urgently, “ _what was the Master of Novices doing exactly one day ago?_ ”

There are certain sets of events which share a property known as _temporal entanglement_ : that is, they are required by the laws of time to occur simultaneously. If one event occurs, the other necessarily must, and not only that, it must occur _at the same time_. Masters of the mysteries of time have commented on the similarities between this phenomenon and the principle of narrative causality, but the two are not the same. _Cause_ and _effect_ generally require a _before_ and an _after_ , whereas temporal entanglement operates on a _now_ and _also now_ basis.4

At this stage of their studies, however, Qu and Lu-Tze had yet to encounter the theory of temporal entanglement. They were therefore unaware that this fascinating property was shared by the following events: one, Qu turning to Lu-Tze with a stricken look on his face; two, Lu-Tze making an aborted dive for the window to his left; and, three, the Master of Novices (who had entered the classroom in the midst of their whispered discussion) stepping onto the trick floor tile.

Not long afterwards they found themselves facing the abbot, who currently looked to be in his eighties or so. 

Lu-Tze was standing very still. Beside him, Qu cast the abbot a worried look and then turned his gaze toward his feet again. “We didn’t mean—it was just—we weren’t expecting the Master of Novices to do _that_!”

“Ah, well,” said the abbot, not unkindly. “Expectation can be a tricky thing.”

Lu-Tze glanced up at him sharply. Was that a hint of _laughter_ in the abbot’s voice?

“That trick with the floor tile might be worth looking further into,” the abbot suggested, “but you were perhaps getting a bit ahead of yourselves testing it out on the Master of Novices at this stage. In the meantime...” He reached beneath the little table beside him and drew out a soft rag and a broom. “There are chalkboards that need erasing and classrooms that need sweeping. Which will it be?”

Qu and Lu-Tze exchanged a glance. 

Lu-Tze reached out first. 

His hand hovered, equidistant from each of the abbot’s outstretched hands.

There are moments when one enters the Trousers of Time and the world seems to pause just past the waistband, moments when the course of history diverges at an unseen juncture ahead and the universe holds its breath, moments when both trouser legs unfurl, equally possible for an endless instant, and life balances at the crotch-seam...

Perhaps those moments simply stretch and pass, and what happens next is merely a matter of chance.

Or perhaps something else occurs, less a question of inevitability than intent... 

Perhaps Time takes note...

And looks toward the ankle-holes... 

And makes a Choice...

Lu-Tze’s hand closed around the broom.

***

Mrs. Marietta Cosmopolite of Number 3 Quirm Street, Rooms for Rent, Very Reasonable, rarely deemed the occasional fracas that took place in her neighborhood sufficient reason to set aside her sewing and leave her residence to investigate. After all, as she frequently admonished the neighborhood girls she sometimes brought in to do a bit of extra sweeping and dusting when the house was particularly full, “There’s no good comes of poking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”5

Nevertheless, the particular row happening today piqued her interest. From the sound of things it had started with the typical five-on-one, ‘give us your money or we’ll beat you up, and maybe we’ll beat you up anyway for the fun of it’ routine that had almost become the city’s official welcome to foreign travelers. Complimentary mugging with your guidebook and city map, there you are then, enjoy your stay in Ankh-Morpork! 

But then, and this was the odd thing, the usual thumps of fists against flesh and heads against cobbles had gone silent.

Very silent. 

Even the pigeons had ceased their flapping and burbling. And anything that could quell the pigeons of Quirm Street was very odd indeed. 

Mrs. Cosmopolite trusted her nose, and it was telling her that it very much did belong in whatever was happening outside on her street today. 

With firm yet cautious steps she approached the door and gripped the doorknob.

In the instant between turning the knob and pulling the door open, a knock sounded. 

Mrs. Cosmopolite opened the door. 

There was no sign of the struggle she had just heard. No sign of anyone, in fact, except a small, smiling, perfectly bald man standing on her doorstep clutching a broom in one hand and pointing at the sign plastered to the doorframe with the other. 

They regarded each other in silence for a long moment.6

When the man didn’t speak, Mrs. Cosmopolite huffed. “I haven’t got all day, you know.”

At that his eyes lit up. “You are Mrs. Cosmopolite?” he asked.

“That’s me.” She scanned the street for any trace of the attackers she had only just heard. There was none.

“And you are offering rooms for rent, very reasonable?”

“So I am, though there’s only two available at the moment. Are you looking for a place to rent?”

“Ah, well, yes, I am. However, I just had a bit of a disagreement with some, ah, locals. I must say I’m quite relieved now that they have departed. Specifically, I am relieved of most of my spare clothes, my knapsack, a recently purchased sausage of intriguingly dubious provenance, and my money.”

Mrs. Cosmopolite looked the man up and down. He appeared entirely unscathed. “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.” Then again, she had heard the beginnings of a scuffle....

“I assure you, that’s what happened. An illuminating lesson in the ridiculousness of material possessions.”

“Where’d they run off to, then?”

The bald man made a vague gesture in the direction of the river. “They decided, upon reflection, that their efforts were better spent elsewhere.”7

“Hmph. Well, you seem an all-right sort, but if you haven’t got any money to pay for rooms I don’t see as how I can rent them.”

“I had hoped your understanding of ‘reasonable’ might extended to accepting work in lieu of payment.”

Once again, Mrs. Cosmopolite gave him an up-and-down appraisal. “And what sort of work can you do?”

He lifted the broom he was holding helpfully. “I have,” he told her, “some little experience with sweeping.”

Penelope Cartwright _had_ turned out to be a bit of a liability, Mrs. Cosmopolite admitted to herself. For all that she flattered herself on a cordial and neighborly relationship with Mrs. Rosemary Palm—there was a reason Mrs. Cosmopolite took pains to identify herself as a _dressmaker_ —the whole incident with Miss Fenella had demanded quite a bit of smoothing over. In any case Mrs. Cartwright would need Penelope back home within the week to help look after the newest of the Cartwrights, if Mrs. Cosmopolite was any judge. 

“All right, then,” she decided. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and all. It’ll have to be the garret room, mind, ‘cos I’ve got to keep the main rooms open for paying guests. Watch the stairs there, that one creaks, and mind the ceiling at the top here. It’s a nasty crack to the skull for anyone too busy watching their feet to keep track of their head. Now, we get all sorts in this house and as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing wrong with that. So long as they’re current with the rent and polite enough to other guests, they can do as they please, and I won’t have you poking your nose where it doesn’t belong, Mr. … I never did get a name, did I?”

The sweeper smiled. “Lu-Tze, madam. I am called Lu-Tze.”

***

Elsewhen: The valley of Oi-Dong hung suspended in time, forever reliving the perfect spring day upon which Wen the Eternally Surprised and his apprentice Clodpool had chanced upon it, with the sun glinting off the snow-capped peaks and the cherry trees forever in bloom.

Amid the gentle breezes monks and acolytes walked the winding paths of terraced gardens. The sun shone down and the scent of cherry blossoms wafted across the monastery. And through the classrooms and shrines filtered the drone of bees, the faint rattle of Procrastinators, and the occasional _thwack_ of an acolyte meeting the wrong end of a senior monk’s staff in one of the dojos. 

All of this had been, and all of this would be, and all of this _was_ , and frankly there came a point where tense became irrelevant and copy-editors threw up their hands and gave the whole thing up as an exercise in futility, because what did it matter how language represented time, if you were describing a place that was timeless?

And yet.

The dust, Lu-Tze found, still piled up. 

He swept it, and there was more the next day, and he swept it again, and there it was again the day after that—and that would be one thing, if it was _the same dust_ just repeating its same endless fall, but he’d found that if he skipped a day of sweeping then he did in fact end up with _two days’ worth of dust_ on the floors when he resumed. 

The dust in the monastery of Oi-Dong eddied and descended and floated about in shafts of sunlight like motes of gold, and flowed through time completely independently of what the rest of the valley was doing. 

And Lu-Tze followed it from classroom to classroom, hallway to hallway, stone path to curving stone path. He pondered the problem of the dust in the back of advanced lectures by senior monks. He turned it over as he took a small silken brush to the surfaces of the most esoteric volumes in Oi-Dong’s libraries. He contemplated it even as his arms continued wielding his broom with movements that grew steadier, firmer, and more even by the day. 

You could learn a lot about time, he discovered, by applying fragments of lectures and excerpts of ancient volumes to the question of dust. 

Dust moved through time on its own terms; and a careful sweeper, he discovered, could start to follow it.

***

Ankh-Morpork was ostensibly built on black loam; but as anyone who possessed either an interest in architectural history or a less than soundly fitted basement floor could tell you, what Ankh-Morpork was really built on was, in fact, Ankh-Morpork.

Less appreciated was the fact that Ankh-Morpork was also largely built _under_ Ankh-Morpork. That is, it was built under the discards and detritus of its thousands of inhabitants, all accumulated over years. Many of the city’s roads were cobbled or paved, but if someone wanted to find the pavement beneath all the rotten vegetables, questionable puddles, collapsed scaffolding, and dung, they’d need a couple hours and some heavy-duty excavating equipment. 

Or, perhaps, a year or three and a good broom. 

Of course, no one in the history of the city had ever swept its public thoroughfares except in the rare case that some civic-minded patron was paying them to do it. 

At least no one ever had that anyone had noticed. 

But then, no one ever notices a sweeper. 

Well.

Almost no one. 

Tradition dictated that members of the Assassins’ Guild wear black. It helped one blend into velvet shadows of night, and, more importantly, it was stylish. A certain Guild scholarship boy had discovered that true black was not in fact the best option for camouflage, as most shadows were actually a very dark grey, or sometimes brown or green. But it took, thought Vetinari, a special kind of talent to remain unseen in garments of saffron orange. 

Perhaps the secret was that the small, bald man carefully sweeping his way toward Cheap Street was not actually attempting to remain _unseen_. He was merely succeeding very well at remaining _unnoticed_. It was, Vetinari mused, a distinction of some significance. 

Even Vetinari himself, who was rather more skilled than most at noticing what was actually there, had to concentrate so as not to lose track of the sweeper. It helped, in his case, that he had a reference point, a temporal anchor of sorts, albeit quite a tenuous one. 

The scent of lilacs, and the sound of revolution, and armor that didn’t quite fit the corpse it covered... and, barely there—barely _then_ —a flash of saffron orange... 

He would, of course, proceed with caution. 

The orange-clad sweeper drew near, and Vetinari stepped from the shadow in which he had been standing. He _knew_ it would have been impossible for the other man to see him there, but the sweeper betrayed no surprise at his sudden appearance. He merely paused, leaning on his broom handle, and smiled politely. 

“I do not wish to impose, of course,” said Vetinari smoothly, “but I was hoping you might assist me with a minor problem.”8

Lu-Tze tilted his head. “And what makes you believe my assistance would be of use? I am, after all, merely a sweeper.”

“We _have_ met before,” Vetiinari pointed out.

“Have we?” 

A pause. “Ah. I see. A question of _whose_ before, as it were.” 

At that, Lu-Tze’s gaze sharpened with interest. He didn’t straighten from where he was leaning on his broom, but to Vetinari’s eye it was apparent that his stance was one from which it would be very difficult for anyone to knock his feet out from under him. 

“Indeed,” said the Sweeper. “Is it not written, ‘Careful, don’t get too far ahead of yourself, there’?”9

“Nonetheless,” said Vetinari. “It has come to my attention that the cobbles on the Street of Cunning Artificers could use some sweeping.”

At Lu-Tze’s nod, the Patrician faded back into the shadows. He would alert Drumknott to clear fifteen minutes of his schedule the next morning, starting at nine-thirty precisely, for a meeting. 

The Sweeper continued on his way.10

***

At twenty-four minutes past nine, a kettle in the Patrician’s Palace let out a whistle. At twenty-six minutes past nine, Drumknott entered Vetinari’s study with two mugs, a teapot, a saucer, and a small tea strainer. Vetinari let the tea steep for an additional three minutes, and then at twenty-nine minutes past nine poured it into each of the mugs. He set them down, steaming, on his desk, and wandered over to the bookcase to select a little volume on Ephebian stonework from the collection there. At nine-twenty-nine and forty-five seconds, he returned to his desk and picked up one of the mugs. By nine-twenty-nine and fifty-seven seconds, he was standing with his back to the large armchair he had brought into his study—a more ostentatious piece of furnishing than he would normally tolerate, but this was a special circumstance. 

Nine-thirty precisely.

He sat nearly all the way down.

A knock sounded. 

Vetinari settled the rest of the way into the armchair, set the book and the mug of tea down onto a side table, and called lightly, “Come in.”

Lu-Tze pushed his way through the door, both hands maintaining a firm grip on his broom, and faced Vetinari directly. 

“You were right, you know, to call me in. He’s more than a bit of a danger, your friend Leonard. Altogether too far ahead of his time.”

“As I surmised. How exactly does that happen?”

Lu-Tze sighed. “Sometimes, as much as we might try to keep things pressed and mended and laundered, a wrinkle creeps in here or there. A pocket gets inverted in the wash. One bit of history gets stitched together, but the scrap cloth gets shoved in somewhere else.... I could stitch him back in where he’s supposed to be, which is official policy on what we're supposed to do when we find something like this. But a whole lot of other stuff would have to be rearranged.”

“And the consequences of that would be..."

“Not worth it, in my opinion. For is it not written, ‘You’ll get a whole lot more than you bargained for, if you keep that up’? The man would be single-handedly responsible for setting off two major wars, an epidemic, and a mass extinction in his own time. Here and now, not enough people actually have the skills or the means to build the stuff he dreams up."

"Hm."

"What I will say is, he doesn’t seem to need much. He has plenty in his head to keep him occupied, so long as he’s got devices to tinker with and paper to draw on. The trick is making sure none of _those_ things escape.”

Vetinari leaned back. “I see. In that case, I believe a solution might present itself.” He inclined his head toward the second mug on the desk. “Tea?”

“Won’t say no,” said Lu-Tze, reaching for it. “For is it not written, ‘It’ll go all cold if you just let it sit there’?”  
  
  
  
  
  
  


__________________________________

1 This is meant quite literally; the History Monks of the Order of Wen the Eternally Surprised had developed a technique of slicing time that enabled them to fit hours into a single second, weeks into a single hour, and lifetimes into a single, as it were, life. Of course, if you didn’t also master the art of circular aging, this resulted not in a prolonged adulthood but in serial reincarnation, and as the abbot could tell you, repeatedly going through teething might be a pain but it didn’t have _anything_ on suffering teenage hormones for the fifty-seventh time. 

2 In other words, six o’clock, or directly behind him. Lu-Tze had observed that the White Waterlilies in the gardens of Oi-Dong always opened at precisely six in the morning; so regular were they that, provided six in the morning was the only time you ever needed to keep track of, you could use them as a near-perfect clock. But perhaps if you combined them with other, similarly punctual plants, you could work the whole day into a garden, at least in-season….

3 Which had resembled a government only in the sense that a chicken resembles a tyrannosaurus rex: they might once have been the same thing, but that was a very long time ago, and the only one remaining in existence nowadays is pretty much only good for a lot of incoherent squawking. 

4 The knock on the door that always comes just as you’re sitting down with a book and a mug of tea, for instance—that happens because of temporal entanglement between the moment the visitor’s knuckles hit the door and the moment your bottom reaches an altitude of two inches above the seat of your armchair.

5 The especially valuable thing about this bit of advice, from Mrs. Cosmopolite’s perspective, was how wonderfully flexible it could be depending on who was giving it and whom it was being given to. For instance, while her employees’ noses belonged in the common rooms, the kitchen, the broom cupboards, the back garden, and the stairwells, and most definitely _not_ in Miss Fenella’s rented guest room, Penelope Cartwright, it is entirely Miss Fenella’s business whom she invites up and what she does with them so long as she doesn’t disturb the other residents and makes sure to stop short of great bodily injury unless properly negotiated or sufficiently deserved, _Mrs. Cosmopolite’s_ nose belonged in a great many more places. It was astonishing what people were willing to reveal to you while you were fitting them out for petticoats.

6 It was long because Lu-Tze was, in fact, prolonging it somewhat to give himself a few additional minutes to figure out what language and term of address would be most appropriate to the situation. 

7 The reflection to which Lu-Tze was referring was in fact the _angle_ of reflection. That is, the angle between a surface and the path an object—or person—takes after striking that surface and bouncing off again (counterpart, of course, to the angle of incidence, or the angle between said object’s or person’s incoming path and the surface with which they are about to make impact). Lu-Tze had not actually done any throwing of assailants into walls. He had merely carefully timed his body’s occupation of certain patches of air to closely precede but narrowly avoid coinciding with his attackers’ fists’ occupation of those same patches of air. An incidental consequence of the precipitous absence of his person was that those fists, rather than connecting with Lu-Tze as their owners had expected, progressed _through_ the now-empty patches of air to make contact instead with their compatriots, who were very much _not_ expecting to be clocked by their own cronies. Expectation is after all a tricky thing, as Lu-Tze could have explained had they only asked. In any case this had addressed most of the differences of opinion between them; he had settled any remaining controversies with a neat trick involving some local pigeons. As the men had come out of the encounter rather the worse for wear, he had given them his clothes, which while simple were rather the better for wear than the torn and bloodied shreds _currently_ in wear, as well as monetary compensation for their troubles and an admonishment that next time they might proceed with more caution when faced with a bald wrinkly smiling man, and just _ask_. 

8 He refrained from delivering these words in the tone he normally used with most guild heads and virtually all of Ankh-Morpork’s aristocracy, which generally led the listener to protest, before even hearing the request, that it wouldn’t be an imposition, not at all, anything, really, only please don’t actually spell out what would happen if they turned him down. 

9 This was, in fact, the second piece of the Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite that Lu-Tze had written down, right after ‘I haven’t got all day, you know.’ He’d recognized it immediately as, almost verbatim, the admonition the abbot had given him the very first day he’d picked up a broom.

10 Or, perhaps, on his Way.


End file.
